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February 21, 2013

admiring the easy read

I just came back from the gym, where I went to buy food and read a book. This is not the most intelligent behaviour for somebody who is doing a photo shoot for this good cause in the very near future. Oh well.

I’m happy I took some time to read. I’m reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and I had one of those fleeting moments when I’m enjoying a book and I think ALL books should be just like the one I’m holding. It’s funny and sad and smart and it just flies by. I think, I want to write a book that just flies by.

But so far, I don’t think this has been my style in anything I’ve published. And I might be wrong or misremembering things…it’s almost certain, anyhow, that the way I feel when reading through one of my own manuscripts is not the same way anybody else would feel. I’ll read something and get tripped up on whatever else I know went into a particular sentence (what I was thinking about when I wrote it, or that tricky clause I took out of it, or the word I wanted to use but couldn’t manage), while someone else finds it all wonderfully lucid. Or at other times (and this is by far the more common pitfall in writing), I know exactly what I’m trying to say and I breeze through it all without a problem, congratulating myself on my clarity while readers are stuck trying to follow my analogies from point A to point B.

It would be nice to write something as straightforward as talking or thinking, so there is nothing for a reader to bump up against and get shaken out of the spell. That’s something I’d like to do.

But I still appreciate other styles of writing! I enjoy and admire difficult books as well as straightforward ones, and I guess I’m saying I’d like to write lots of books and lots of different kinds of books, if that turns out to be possible.